Let the old world make believe—it’s blind and deaf and dumb. But nothing can change the shape of things to come. —”Max Frost and the Troopers” (1968)

Our opening photo today is from the groundbreaking adaptation of H.G. Wells’s 1933 novel The Shape of Things to Come—groundbreaking more in terms of production and set design than accurate predictions of things to come. Impending world war, yes. Devastating bombing of cities, yes. These, after all, had been experienced in the recent past. But then it veers into utopian realms of fancy that, despite their breathtaking visual impact in the film, no longer wield much credibility or exercise much hold on our imaginations.

Our opening quote is from a pop song also titled “The Shape of Things to Come.” It was the centrepiece of the 1968 satirical exploitation flick Wild in the Streets, wherein 14-year-olds get the vote and all sorts of, well, wild things happen. Especially in the streets. The phrase reductio ad absurdum comes to mind. The famed husband-and-wife songwriting team of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil infused the lyrics with the utopian flavour of the time, seasoned with a dollop of revolutionary apocalypse. The group that “performs” the song in the film is fictional (hence the quotation marks in the attribution above), but it was released as a single and nestled itself in the Top 40 for many nonfictional weeks that year. (The vocals were dubbed by Harley Hatcher, known for his biker movie film scores— and yes, his first name really was, coincidentally, Harley.)

Past intuitions about the future rarely hold up in the present. Or, to quote baseball zen master Yogi Berra, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” Unless, maybe, you’re Nostradamus. Which leads us to the real reason for the title of this month’s post. I want to drop some hints, lay down some markers, make some utopian predictions that may or may not hold up, about what will be appearing here in the coming months.

First, I’ll only be posting monthly from here on, with occasional interim surgical strikes when I experience spasms of brilliance that demand to be shared. Unfortunately, the vast tracts of free time I had anticipated in retirement have turned out to be just another utopian mirage.

Second, I’ll continue talking about some of the books I’ve been reading, and try to catch up with a backlog that’s accumulated. As you’ve likely surmised by now, by “talking” I mean commenting impressionistically on the books in a conversational fashion, not writing full-length reviews. If we’re meeting for coffee and you ask me what I’ve been reading lately, you’re not expecting a 3,000-word oral essay. So.

In my tag line I’ve promised you synchronicity, and by Grabthar’s Hammer, by the suns of Worvan, you shall have it. In digestible portions, mind you. Our synchronicitous guests will include:

• Carl Jung, who coined the term “synchronicity” to signify “an acausal connecting principle.”
• Jung’s collaborator Marie-Louise von Franz, who will talk about its connections to divination and the cyclical and patterned time experienced in ancient and Oriental cultures.
• Ira Progoff, another Jungian, who’ll explain how archetypes can constellate events and how to keep track of this mischief with synchronicity notebooks.
• Notable weirdo of yesteryear Robert Anton Wilson and his curious 1988 essay collection Coincidance: A Head Test.
• The most notorious weirdo of them all, Philip K. Dick, who will say “a few words” (about a million of them, actually) about his Exegesis of the uncanny events that dominated the last decade of his life.
• Polymath Arthur Koestler and an early glimpse of the New Physics in The Roots of Coincidence (1972).
• A “surprise” guest—the only living, contemporary author on our panel—who will try to pull it all together for us but will also throw the occasional glass of cold water in our faces. (No, it’s not me.)

And that’s not all, as the infomercial guys say. I’ll talk about two stimulating recent reads on artificial intelligence:

• Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI (2019) [scientists and thinkers who’ve spent most of their careers in this field]
• Moral AI and How We Get There (2024) [a computer scientist, a data engineer, and a philosopher]

I also want to blather vaguely about some of my favourite short story writers, and short stories in general. E.g., why are some of them so unforgettable, and most of them barely register even while I’m reading them?

It’s going to be a busy fall and winter. You won’t want to miss it!

SYNCHRO TALE OF THE MONTH

This month’s encounter with coincidence is no mere snack, but rather a fully rounded, quite poignant tale of life—complete with a past, a present, and a future.

Just before noon on September 2, I heard a ruckus of magpies and looked out our big front bay window to see a dozen or so across the street, milling around an obviously deceased one of their number. I had heard about such “magpie funerals” but never witnessed one. I grabbed my phone and headed out the front door hoping to record a video. Just as I was about to cross the street, a car pulled up right across the driveway, blocking my way. “What the . . .?” I muttered testily to myself.

A cheerful pre-teen boy rolled down the passenger window and waved at me, and the older lady who was driving leaned over him and said, loud enough for me to hear, “I lived in this house in 1975!”

She introduced herself and her 11-year-old grandson who had waved and got my attention; “otherwise we might just have driven on!” he exclaimed. He was bright, articulate, and poised. I silently wished I had been like him when I was his age. I invited them in and introduced them to Jana, and we gave her a tour of the ground floor and Jana’s gorgeous backyard garden.

She told us this was the first house she and her husband had bought. They lived here for a few years until their first child was born, then moved to something bigger in a newer neighbourhood. Their first monthly mortgage payment in 1975 was only $125, by no means a slam-dunk for them in those days. She’d had the bay window installed soon after they moved in. (We thanked her for that!) The back door, which now opens onto the deck, had been off the kitchen, where our fridge is now. There’d been no garage, so her backyard was much bigger. And so on.

While she shared with us part of the mysterious past of the house we’ve lived in for 22 years, we were sharing with her the future of the house she’d left almost 50 years ago. It was an emotional visit for her; there were some tears, as her husband had recently passed away after a long struggle with Alzheimer’s. Patting her grandson’s shoulder, she emphasized how wonderful he had been to his grandpa during that time. Jana and I were not surprised. As we adults drifted in time, he remained astonishingly stable, sparkling. We were contemplating the past and future; he was living the present. He was what is called nowadays mindful. He hadn’t yet learned to be any other way. Even our sceptical cat Max trotted forward, seeking his benediction. They were both lovely people, and, as we said goodbye, we felt we’d received a gift that day.

So it turned out that the bereavement of the magpies was but one part of a diptych. A causal element, perhaps, since without their funeral I wouldn’t have found myself outside to invite the lady and her grandson in for a visit. As we’ve seen, synchronicity is supposed to be acausal. But I think we can wink that wrinkle away this time: after all, who’s to decide what’s a “cause,” and what’s just another piece of the puzzle?

PROUST QUOTE OF THE MONTH

[Marcel, in the story, although nowhere near drunkard territory, has indeed had a few. That our notions of the future are conditioned by the reflections of our past is hardly surprising. But sometimes it takes a slightly tipsy poet to show us what’s right in front of us. Emphasis mine.]

I was enclosed in the present, like heroes and drunkards; momentarily eclipsed, my past no longer projected before me that shadow of itself which we call our future; placing the goal of my life no longer in the realisation of the dreams of the past, but in the felicity of the present moment, I could see no further than it.

SONG OF THE MONTH

This was a huge hit for Carly Simon in 1971, and I was besotted seeing her perform it live on the David Steinberg show. I dug her hesitant onstage presence, mistaking for a disarming shyness what was actually a lifelong battle with debilitating stage fright for her. I’m relieved that the song holds up after a half-century, because I love how she flirts with tense in the individual lines of the lyrics. First verse: future/present/present/prospective future. Second verse: present/present/past/prospective future. Third verse: future/present/present/retrospective future. It’s sort of a shell game or three-card monte she’s playing here with the tenses, culminating in a devastating zen paradox that Yogi himself would be proud of. These are, indeed, always, the good old days.